ProtoJeb21

At the JWST Early Science Conference back in December, they teased the results for the sub-Neptune GJ 1214b. During a 38 hour long observation, JWST was able to observe the day side of the planet right before it passed behind its star and collect information on its atmospheric composition, which has been a pain to do for more than a decade due to a thick layer of clouds/hazes. The lead authors of this investigation said that they still have work to do on the data, but have found evidence for water and methane, and the data seems to show that the atmosphere is enriched in compounds heavier than hydrogen and helium. The planet's bulk density is compatible with either a H/He atmosphere over a rocky core and small water mantle or a gigantic water mantle with a steam atmosphere, and it seems to me that the preliminary JWST results are pointing towards the latter. I'm quite excited for the paper on this investigation. GJ 1214b was one of those early exoplanets that really got me excited about and into the field. Also GJ 1214b is one of twenty exoplanets targeted by JWST to be in the IAU's third NameExoWorlds campaign. Some of the name submissions are available on YouTube. Two Greek organizations submitted names (Laurus and Bellerophone), but only one name submission is accepted per country, so only one has made it to the ongoing final vote. Which one did is unknown. I do wish the IAU would allow multiple names per country because it didn't seem like there were a ton of good ones being submitted, and some planets may get more submissions than others.

I feel like the term "dwarf planet" needs retooling. Pretty much any spherical object in the Kuiper Belt can be counted as a dwarf planet - gravitationally rounded bodies that haven't fully cleared their orbits - but the truth probably isn't that simple. A 2019 paper (Grundy et al. 2019) on a ~600 km KBO whose name I won't even attempt to try and spell concluded that some KBOs below 900-1000 km in diameter may not be fully differentiated and exhibit internal porosity. If that's the case, then the largest dwarf planets like Pluto, Eris, pre-impact Haumea, Makemake, Quaoar, and Gonggong are massive enough to both collapse into a sphere and have differentiated interiors, while many sub-900 km dwarf planets/KBOs may be rounded but undifferentiated. This may finally be a lower size limit on what can be considered planets and I think should be incorporated into the definitions of planets and dwarf planets. I'd argue that internal differentiation is a more important classification criteria than orbital clearing, not just because the definition of latter is vague and arbitrarily excludes pretty much every major planet (asteroids cross their orbits so technically they violate that criteria), but because it isn't really about the properties of the object itself. Rather, it's based on the object in comparison with its surroundings. Internal differentiation is a key characteristic of an object's structure and formation, is easy to understand, and can set a hard lower limit for planets or dwarf planets. I think the best options are to set a dividing line at 900-1000 km, and either make all the dwarf planets above that into major planets, or demote all the dwarf planet candidates below that into their own new category of KBO/SSSO. As for Pluto, I think there's decent justification for upgrading back to a planet. Even with my suggested internal differentiation criteria, whether Pluto would officially get upgraded to a planet or not depends if the IAU ever does anything about the orbital clearing criteria.

Take Two's fiscal year ends in, what, a month? If they're really planning on cancelling KSP2 are are just trying to recoup some losses with a cobbled together Early Access, we'll probably know then. The next few weeks are also critical to see how fast and successfully the devs are able to respond to the performance and optimization problems with the current build. I haven't gotten KSP2 yet and I'll probably wait at least a few weeks, hopefully when the game is a little better optimized and isn't guaranteed to fry my potato of a laptop from 2016. I will agree this is a pretty bad and concerning launch state, and that EA was probably forced by T2, but there are some current parts of the game (vastly improved planets, color customization, new interplanetary parts, etc) that I'm excited to try out eventually.

I think with the quality of the game right now, we'll probably need a good few months of >90% of the dev team working on optimization, bugfixes, and porting over some missing KSP1 content like heating/reentry effects, inventory, and a handful of parts that aren't tied to other parts of the roadmap (ex: I don't expect any science parts until we get science mod and tech tree updates, even though the original game had those parts introduced well before the mode). So that'd mean there would be barely any progress on roadmap content for a decent chunk of time. However, if the game's foundation is successfully improved in the coming months, then a further delay to science, colonies, etc wouldn't be much of a problem. Even now I think we could get science mode before the end of 2023.

Aine has gotten a complete overhaul. Instead of being an ultra-dense rocky Super-Earth, it is a volatile rich Mini-Neptune with a thick water mantle over a rock-iron interior. I gave it a ring system even though one is unlikely IRL. In the mod, it's from a moon that was shoved too close to the planet by the gravity of its star, ripping it apart.

K2-266Ab, an Ultra Short Period planet. GJ 1018b, a warm water-rich Super-Earth. The plans for the initial release have changed again. K2-266Ab and GJ 1018b will be in the initial release, alongside Aine/C17-2b and the three rocky planets of C13-7. As I mentioned before, I want to focus on just a few planets at first instead of rushing out like a dozen. Also, with the new Scatterer update out, I need to redo the visuals for every planet that will be in the first version. GJ 1018b is done and looks far better than before; in the prior version, the atmo rim was very faint and the day-night transition was very abrupt.

Is Eve's color going to be the result of liquid and gaseous iodine in KSP2? These shots remind me of the version of Eve from the mod JNSQ, where the purple color is also the result of iodine.

The initial release will likely just be the C17-2 and C18-16 systems. C17-2 contains Aine and its moon Aillen, while C18-16 has four gas planets and one ocean planet. This way, I can have an interesting multi-planet system in the first release, and dedicate a lot of time to a small number of rocky bodies to make them very high quality. I'm already working on a new, hand-made texture for Aine.

I love the idea of a young solar system in its first few hundred million years of existence. Are Rask and Rusk also in the Debdeb system? Their new textures seem to have the same heavy cratering as Char and Gurdamma. Ovin is going to be a pain trying to land on. Also, scaling it up to IRL scale, Ovin is so big that it's nearly in the size range of Mega-Earths, rocky (or mostly rocky) planets of >10 Earth masses; examples include HD 21749b, K2-56b, K2-66b, and Kepler-411b. At 1.6x Kerbin's radius (960 km), Ovin would be 9600 km/1.507 Earth radii when scaled up 10x, and a surface gravity of 4G yields a mass of 9.08 Earths and a density of 14.6 g/cm3.

A work in progress moon for Aine. It's about the size of Minmus and is caught between the strong tidal forces of the planet and star.

I've been doing a lot of interplanetary missions in my career save over the last few days, alongside Mun and Minmus contracts. Earlier, I sent a pair of relay probes to Duna, DENCA-1 and DENCA-2 (Duna Equatorial Navigation and Comms Array), to prepare for future missions once I get contracts. However, one of the probes kept glitching out upon separating from the transfer stage. I had no choice but to turn on the unbreakable joints cheat so it wouldn't explode, then I got the other probe into its correct orbit. Going out of physics range caused the glitchy probe to correct itself, and now I can correct its orbit later on. I launched the MOAL mission once a Moho transfer window opened up prior to DENCA arriving at Duna. However, it was a pretty bad trajectory, requiring a significant mid-course inclination change and a 5 km/s capture burn - which ended up costing around >6 km/s of dV and lasted half an hour. Fortunately, I packed plenty of dV into the transfer stage and orbiter. Once captured, the orbit and lander separated, with the orbiter staying in a high polar orbit and the lander getting into an equatorial orbit to prepare for landing. After a mission to finish a contract for Mimas Station, a contract to transmit science from Moho's surface appeared, so I used the MOAL lander to fulfill that. The Mimas Station contract was fulfilled by adding on two of the big orange fuel tanks with 1.25m docking ports, which I'll use for ore canisters that can be filled and deposited by Hyperion and Theia-class transports I developed a few weeks ago. Finally, an Eve transfer window has opened up, and with over 9M funds, I have plenty of cash to spend on four 150-250K probes: The three Freya probes (an orbiter, a science return mission, and a rover), and the Phaethon Corona Sampler. It will use an Eve flyby to get into a lower solar orbit, because its mission is to get all the way down to Kerbol's atmosphere - something I've never attempted before. At least one Eve gravity assist will make the whole thing way more efficient. This first Eve flyby will be able to get Phaethon into an orbit with a periapsis slightly closer than Moho, and an apoapsis at Eve's orbit, opening up the possibility for a second one. So far I've only launched Freya I. It too is aiming for a close Eve flyby to capture, so seeing what the resulting Kerbolar orbit would be like led me to decide to have Phaethon perform a flyby. I won't be doing an aerocapture despite the heat shield; I added WAY too much dV for an Eve orbiter.

WIP revamp for Aine. Its transit geometry suggests it could be in a very eccentric (e=0.48) orbit and be transiting at periapsis, which would make it about 1.8 Earth radii instead of 2.0 Re. The massive temperature swings would probably dry out the equator. WIP initial texture for Melera/C13-7c, a Sub-Earth within the right temperature range to host liquid Iodine on its surface. Future texture iterations will reduce the liquid covering on the surface to some small seas and lakes - and will be hand drawn instead of some garbage from Grand Designer. The color scheme will remain more or less the same, however. Maybe the atmosphere will be changed to a light indigo, but I don't want Melera to feel like Eve but smaller.

Added on to Darwin Station in LKO and tested out the in-space construction feature for the first time. Then I sent a couple of missions to Minmus. First was Minthe II, which had a 7-seat transfer module to pick up Val from Minthe Base and Peter stuck in LMO, as well as a reusable lander that could function with or without crew. Next was the core module for Minthe Station. I docked and refueled Minthe Lander there, and eventually the station will have fuel conversion and crew. To cap off today's station work, I continued my contracted expansion of Mimas in low Munar orbit, and used the construction feature again to clamp down a weak docking joint. It's stuck at an angle now, but Lodry Kerman will be able to fix it later on. I just need another ~3200 units of LF on Mimas to complete this contract.

Every time the Kerbal jumped, he stood 1m above where he was before, standing on nothing but air. I shot him up with a canon with gravity hacked and he smacked into the launchpad. Then when I tried to get him up, the glitch appeared.

I started a pure-stock Career Mode save a few weeks back and have almost fully unlocked the tech tree. I have two contracts for Eve missions: put a probe in a specified orbit, and perform a flyby and return the craft to Kerbin. Two probes (Freya I and II) will be launched together to fill those contracts, and Freya I will remain in orbit as a gravity/resource scanner and relay probe until I can establish a proper network. However, I want to take full advantage of the upcoming transfer window, so I've been designing Freya III, a rover that'll land near Eve's largest crater. Originally I was going with an Oppy-style rover in a giant aeroshell, and would be deployed with a skycrane. This had several problems - lots of staging and extra probe cores, the possibility of the aeroshell overheating and exploding, the sheer size of the aeroshell, the solar panels breaking off, and the possibility of not being able to remove the skycrane one the rover had touched down. I went back and completely redid Freya III's landing method. Instead of a skycrane and an aeroshell, it'll just be stored in a 2.5m cargo bay with a heat shield and parachutes. I also swapped out the panels with a radioelectric generator and added some more Mystery Goos. I tested this twice using the stock HyperEdit, first on Kerbin and then on Eve coming from a far steeper angle than I would in the actual mission. It performed well both times (and don't worry, I reverted the flight. I'm not cheating my way to Eve). I was hoping the lander can would act as a relay for the rover, but apparently not. That will make Freya I even more crucial. I might put it in geosynchronous orbit above Freya III's landing site until the rover completes its mission, then the orbiter can enter an upper-atmo grazing orbit for its main science operations.